Amílcar Lopes Cabral

Amílcar Lopes Cabral (born September 12, 1924, Bafatá, Portuguese Guinea [now Guinea-Bissau]—died January 20, 1973, Conakry, Guinea) was an agronomist, nationalist leader, and founder and secretary-general of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde; PAIGC), who helped lead Guinea-Bissau to independence. He was a leading African thinker of the 20th century.

After receiving his early education in Cape Verde, Cabral pursued university studies in Lisbon, where he helped to found the Centro de Estudos Africanos, an association of Lusophone African students that included future Angolan president Agostinho Neto. While in Lisbon, Cabral and some of his fellow African students developed political theories regarding colonialism and liberation. After graduating in 1950, Cabral was employed by the Portuguese colonial authorities as an agronomist. In the early 1950s he traveled widely in Portuguese Guinea in order to conduct a survey of the land and its resources, which provided him with the opportunity to interact with people from various cultures who lived in the colony. During that time Cabral also continued to contemplate national liberation for colonies in Africa. In September 1956 he and five associates—including a brother, Luís, and Aristides Pereira—formed the PAIGC, and in December of that year he cofounded a liberation movement in Angola with Neto.

Cabral rapidly emerged as the leader of the PAIGC. The group organized early political resistance to colonial power in the form of workers’ strikes—calling for better wages and improved conditions. However, the Pidjiguiti Massacre in August 1959, when the Portuguese fired on demonstrators during a dockworkers’ strike, demonstrated to the PAIGC that a different approach was needed. Resistance activity was subsequently shifted to the countryside and was altered to make use of guerrilla-style tactics.

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Beginning in 1963, Cabral took his party into an open war for the independence of Portuguese Guinea, and in the late 1960s Cabral was the de facto ruler of the parts of Portuguese Guinea not occupied by army units from Portugal. In 1972 he established the Guinean People’s National Assembly as a step toward independence. In January 1973 Cabral was shot outside his home in Conakry in neighbouring independent Guinea, where his party had established its headquarters. He was killed by Inocêncio Kani, a disgruntled PAIGC guerrilla war veteran who was believed to have been working with Portuguese agents. In September of that year the PAIGC unilaterally declared Guinea-Bissau’s independence, a status formally achieved on September 10, 1974, with Cabral’s brother Luís as the new country’s first president.

Cabral’s efforts in the guerrilla war against the Portuguese military were matched by his contributions to the literature of national liberation. Cabral’s main contribution was his study of colonized identity and leadership in the context of national liberation, class consciousness, and Marxian theory. For Cabral, culture was key to national liberation. He articulated a process of “re-Africanization,” by which Africa’s elite, long beholden to the colonizers for their education and employment, would re-embrace indigenous African culture and reintegrate themselves into mass popular culture. Only by doing so could Africa’s indigenous leaders re-create an independent identity—socially, culturally, and psychologically—and rally a nationalist spirit in the rural peasantry, whose lives had largely been untouched by imperialism. Colonized people could then regain control over their lives, “reenter history,” and retap their “national productive forces.” This movement he called “Returning to the Source.” With his emphasis on national consciousness and indigenous development, Cabral’s views remain relevant to contemporary discussions of African underdevelopment and the limits of postcolonial governments across the continent.

Many of Cabral’s speeches and writings were collected in Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts (1969), Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amílcar Cabral (1973), and Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings (1979; 2nd ed., 2008).